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Whenever I travel to another country, I do my best to try and learn a few of the basic phrases necessary to make purchases, thank people, ask directions, and so on. My latest adventure in Azerbaijan was no exception. Though my trip was quick and I knew that I could get by with Russian there, I still managed to pick up a few words.

First of all, I should note that Azeri is sometimes also referred to as Azari, Azeri Turkish, or Azerbaijanian Turkish, and it’s not only spoken in Azerbaijan. According to this Wikipedia entry, Azeri is also spoken in Russia proper, Russia’s Republic of Dagestan, south-eastern Georgia, northern Iraq, eastern Turkey, and Ukraine.

Learning to count in Azeri is not so difficult, and it’s a definately necessary to get a handle of the numbers as I’ve found they’ll sometimes try to charge you more as a foreigner. Here’s how it works:

zero - sîfîr, nol
one - bir
two - iki
three - üç
four - dörd
five - besh
six - altî
seven - yeddi
eight - s?kkiz
nine - doqquz
ten - on

Past that, you just have to learn the words for the tens, hundreds, and thousands and slap the above digits onto the end. For example, eleven is on bir (ten, one). Fifty-three is ?lli üç (fifty, three).

Some basic phrases that anyone going to Azerbaijan should learn:

Salam (hello)
S?n nec?s?n? (how are you?)
Yaxshiyam (fine)
Babatdir (okay)
Sag^v ol (thank you)

Though I found out that you can also say the phrase teshekkur ediram, which is what I learned to say when I was in Turkey last May. Apparently they also say that in Iranian Azeri.

Here in Moscow we have several Azeri restaurants with Azeri names. I made it a point to find out while I was in Baku what they mean. There’s an Azeri buffet chain here called Shesh-Besh. I knew that besh meant five, but what about shesh? Well, I found that it means six in Farsi. It turns out that 6-5 is a roll of the dice in Backgammon, which is probably the most popular game in Azeri culture.

There’s also a cafe place here called Chaikhana. I could easily figure out that it was basically tea-shop or something like that, but I wanted to find out exactly what the khana particle meant. An Azeri friend I met told me that ‘khana’ means place in Azeri. So Chaikhana means place for tea. As I strolled the streets of Baku I found tons of examples of this type of construction. For example:

Poçtxanaz - post office (place for post/mail)
X?st?xana - hospital (not sure exactly what X?st? means)
B?rb?rxana - barbershop (place for barbers)
Kitabxana - library (place for books)
M?hmanxana - hotel (place for guests)

I’m sure there are tons more of these type of words.

My Azeri friends told me that Azeri would be a much easier language to learn than Russian. This could be the case, but I have to admit that it is a very intimidating language at first. Russian was that way for me at first too.

A few great online resources for learning about Azeri are:
Learn Azeri
Articles about Azeri as spoken in the Azerbaijan Republic
Azeri Language Tutor